A tour of the West: Louisville to Wyoming

In late May my husband and I embarked on an 11-day, 4500-mile road-trip from Louisville, KY to points West. The main goal was Yellowstone National Park, but it was also an opportunity to see and experience some of the iconic places of the West that I've only read about. I hesitated over all that time in a vehicle. I'm not really that great on car trips, and this would be the granddaddy of them all. But, when I found myself at liberty (um, unemployed), we decided to just do it. Armed with car snacks and audio books, we took to the road. Our first day, we drove to Kansas City where you can get great, spicy barbecue at Gates & Sons (and delicious gelato downtown). It's also the historic jumping-off place for the Oregon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail. And, roughly, one follows at least some of the Lewis and Clark route.

 I've been as far as KC before, but I never went north, so all of the Mountain West was going to be new territory for us. We shot up I-29, stopping for lunch and a local beer in Sioux City, IA on a sleepy Saturday afternoon, and then pushed on to Sioux Falls, SD, a cool little city where we spent our second night. The falls are on the Big Sioux River, which runs through downtown, and they are surrounded by a neat green park with a new observation deck that you can climb for views in all directions, including the city's skyline. As on pretty much the rest of the trip, we were blessed with clear blue skies. We spent a late afternoon there taking pictures and hanging out by the rocks before dinner.

If you ever find yourself in Sioux Falls, go to Phillips Avenue where many restaurants, small shops, and bars can be found, and you can take in the sculpture walk. I didn't get a good picture of it, but there was an awesome dinosaur sculpture made out of what looked like old tractor parts and other random bits of machinery. It looked pretty fierce. We had juicy steaks at Minerva's, the flagship restaurant of a regional chain of nine or so steakhouses. It's fairly upscale with an excellent playlist of jazz and indie artists. Yeah, we were really roughing it so far!

Badlands

The next day was a big one, and we needed the extra hour we were going to pick up crossing time zones. From Sioux Falls, we headed west again across southern South Dakota, where our first stop was going to be Badlands National Park. We took the Loop Road through, stopping at pull-outs but not doing any hiking. It was a pleasant day in the upper 70s, maybe even 80s, and it doesn't take long to figure out that if you got yourself stuck out there in the heat of summer, you would pretty much dessicate on the spot and blow away in a puff of white dust. It is bleak and weird and awe-inspiring scenery, the result of sediments deposited by an ancient sea, and eroded into buttes, pinnacles, and every contorted shape of rock you can imagine. It's a huge fossil bed surrounded by grass prairie, a place where saber-tooth tigers once roamed.

While I can be amazingly oblivious to things around me most of the time, in wild places I tend to ratchet up my attention several degrees, looking for wildlife large and small. There are warning signs about rattlesnakes (don't stick a hand or foot where you can't see what's there), and Badlands seem made for them -- lots of blazing hot surfaces with handy cracks and crevices to hide in. I did not spy any, thankfully. But for once, I had my binoculars so that I could spot the Bighorn Sheep ambling around the canyon rocks, too far away to see with the naked eye. My husband went back to the car for the zoom lens and managed to get some pretty decent pictures, considering how far they were. There were three or four (none with the huge, curved ram horns), including a little one. It's heartening to see these animals in a place where they are unlikely to be disturbed.

The other residents are the prairie dogs, which we passed on the way out. First, you spot their dirt mounds, then all the pert little figures, paws folded down in front, alert and watching your progress, probably thinking, good riddance! as they yap to each other and zip across the grass to the next dog's doorstep. We could easily have spent more time there, but we aimed to reach Deadwood before dark, so rejoined I-90 at Wall. Wall Drugstore -- you probably know about the billboards lining the road for miles, even if you've never been there. You might as well stop in if you're already there, but it's kind of crowded and touristy otherwise. Still, they have good ice cream, which is the only reason you need. I pretty much craved ice cream for this entire trip. Must be the dry air.

Black Hills

I should mention at this point that my husband picked out the books for this trip. He's not a professional librarian for nothing. First, was an excellent book in the Penguin Series of American Indian History, The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground. As we were headed for the Black Hills, it was especially relevant, and it certainly gives you a different perspective on visiting Mt. Rushmore, which we did on the way to Deadwood. From the distance, just outside of Rapid City, you can see the hills rising, blanketed by spruce and pine, looking as mysterious as you would expect even with the signs of modern suburbia in the foreground. There's a little tourist trap called Keystone that you pass through, got up tackily like little Gatlingburg, that sort of hurts your heart as you get closer to Rushmore.

It started a fine drizzle as we parked the car and mounted the steps to the platform space where you can view the mountain. It's impressive, but if you're fairly ambivalent about the whole thing, it only takes about half an hour to have a look, take a few pictures and skedaddle on out of there. You actually get a view of it on the road up, so you know, you could just opt not to pay the fee and keep on going. We actually had to backtrack to get on the road to Deadwood, which is a scenic route through the National Forest, skirting Sheridan Lake and the Pactola Reservoir. The drizzle sent a swirling mist through the trees and gaps that was appropriately ghostly, but it brightened up as we got closer to town and our little, no-frills hotel for the night.

Once we checked in and freshened up, we headed to town proper and the main street of kitschy bars and restaurants that have grown up around the fabled gulch. We were big fans of the HBO series, so who could resist having a drink in Deadwood? I had a sissy gin on the rocks in some dark bar I don't remember the name of. It was the least cutesy-looking. Cue the Swearingen jokes and rude quotes. Most of the bars have big, shiny slot machines and do not look like anywhere Wild Bill would be caught dead in (the site of the No. 10 Saloon where Bill met his doom is noted but no longer a saloon). The Bullock Hotel was on the list for dinner but we ended up in a little upstairs joint I found on Yelp called the Deadwood Social Club. It was pretty darn good. My husband had a bison steak, well-prepared and juicy, and I had some pasta with wild pheasant and mushrooms. Deadwood is also Mecca for Harley enthusiasts -- they have a huge bike rally every summer in nearby Sturgis; you will want to avoid that time unless you're into that sort of thing. In any case you would want to make your lodging/camping reservation many months in advance. That was it for Deadwood -- a drink and dinner, and a place to sleep.

Devil's Tower

We found some coffee for the road the next morning and headed west into Wyoming. Devil's Tower is all by itself, not too far from Sundance, but you pretty much have to mean to go there. It's very pretty country with rolling hills studded by buttes, pines and shrubs, and grazing cattle. Devil's Tower is stark and surprising in the landscape -- there is literally nothing else that looks like it anywhere around; it's eerie. No wonder that the Indians revere it as a sacred space. I think there are several stories about how it came to be, but my favorite one is this: seven sisters were being chased in play by their brother who magically turned into a fierocious black bear. They scrambled on top of a tree stump and were saved when it ascended toward the sky, the bear's claws scoring the sides as it rose. The sisters were set in the heavens as stars. There are signs at Devil's Tower reminding visitors not to disturb the prayer flags and bundles left around the tower's base.

We wound up to the base where you can park and get out to explore. If you are an adventurer, you can register to climb it, and we saw a handful of daredevils who were doing it. We were happy to walk the trail around it, very easy and bordered by trees for shade and little meadows of wildflowers. There are also overlooks into the green valley below, a curve of river, and cows, more cows!

Gargantuan tumbled columns of rock have fallen around the base, accounting for the vertical striations in the face of the tower. It is a type of igneous rock called phonolitic porphyry, according to the geologists. Apparently hot magma seeping between gaps in softer rocks cooled underground and then everything eroded around it. I need to bone up on geology -- the West is a geologist's (and archaeologist's) dream! Everywhere you look, there's some strange feature of rock, a riot of colors, rivers still carving up everything, and avalanches of stone in the making. Devil's Tower was more interesting than I expected it to be and worth going out of the way for if you're traveling in the area. It was not terribly crowded when we were there, even though it was Memorial Day. We had a little lunch on the way out at an overpriced grill, so you'd do better to pack a sandwich or go a little further out for food. Now, to head north again.


(To Be Continued)

Barbara Tuchman explains why the British lost the American colonies

I just finished historian Barbara Tuchman's final published book (she died in 1989), The First Salute. She gives the international perspective on the American Revolution, describing the background of Britain's conflicts with its European rivals in order to explain how and why Holland and France aided the colonies in their fight for independence.

The book's title refers to the event on November 16, 1776, when Johannes de Graaf, Dutch governor of the Caribbean island of St. Eustatius, ordered a response to the U.S. Brig-of-War Andrew Doria as it entered the island's port. This was the first recognition of U.S. national vessel after the Declaration of Independence.

Tuchman offers great character sketches of a number of players, including De Graaff, British Admiral George Rodney, British General Henry Clinton, and George Washington. She conveys the incredible difficulties facing both sides in a compelling fashion -- and how those difficulties translated into the savagery that always accompanies wars, especially those in which it is hard to sort out friend and foe, civilian and soldier.

Here is her brilliant summation of all that contributed to Britain's defeat:

Here was the problem as an empire slid from under their feet: the problem of making do with faulty processes and broken parts, of misunderstood signals, of the useless rigidity of Fighting Instructions, of a scurvy-producing diet, of political quarrel among combat officers, of employing worn-out and withered naval commanders, of putting the protection of trade ahead of strategic operations, of poor and too often the false intelligence of enemy movements and intentions and, embracing all these, the problem of not knowing or caring to know the nature of the enemy and undertaking to suppress a major rebellion on the assumption that the rebels could be described, in the words of Lord Rawdon, a respected British officer, as "infatuated wretches." (excerpt from the final chapter, "Last Chance -- The Yorktown Campaign")

I was reminded of the old saw, "those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it," as I read this book. But I supposed it is the disease of empire to overreach and underestimate, even when history teaches the same lesson over and over again.

Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, October 19, 1781, by which over 7,000 British and Hessians became prisoners. Copy of lithograph by James Baillie, ca. 1845.
National Archives Identifier 532883

The Difference Engine: Alternate history, steampunk, and the Romantics

The Difference Engine, a novel co-written by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling and published in 1991, is considered one of the core texts, if not the originator, of the steampunk genre of fiction. This is not a genre with which I'm very familiar, although I've occasionally strayed into the sci-fi/fantasy/speculative fiction area. One of my favorite authors is John Crowley, who wrote, among other things, the sprawling and fantastic Aegypt tetralogy and the classic fantasy novel Little Big. Another favorite is China Mieville, who first blew my mind with The City & The City, and more recently with Embassytown. What I love about both these authors is the absolute audacity of their intellect and imagination. Their fantasy worlds feel like real ones that have simply been lost or overwritten or exist in a dimension a few doors down from our own. They inspire a sense of wonder and manage to mash up so many things that I love -- history, science, literature, and general weirdness.

Analytical Engine, Science Museum in London (Bruno Barral)

Crowley and Mieville point down the path that led me to The Difference Engine, along with one of my first literary loves, the Romantic poets. And as if that weren't enough, my recent years spent as an editor for a technology website brought me back around to Charles Babbage, inventor of the proto-computer, and Ada Byron, known as the mother of programming. She was first known to me as the daughter of one of the nineteenth century's most scandalous and magnificent rogues, the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, whose portrait graces the wall of my dining room. Yep, I'm that kind of person. In other words, I was pretty much meant to read this book, so I finally unearthed a copy the old-fashioned way, in a second-hand, brick-and-mortar bookshop, as if I had been magically transported back to 1982!

I got off to a creaking start, then flew through it like the pages were on fire, and ended slowly, scratching my head and wondering if I had missed something crucial along the way. Thankfully, after reading some other reviews, I realized I was not actually dense and inattentive, but that the book does in fact, leave some loose ends and that there is no "big reveal". This is not necessarily a criticism, although there is a bit of a let-down when the rollicking, "thrillery" part of the novel screeches to a sudden halt, and the vague epilogue begins. I found the pleasures of the novel to outweigh the disappointments; however, the pleasures will surely be few if you are truly without any knowledge of Victorian England, its history, politics, or literature. Some of the characters are fictional creations of the authors, some are fictional creations of a real Victorian author (characters in Benjamin Disraeli's novel, Sybil), and some are historical figures like Byron, Sam Houston, and John Keats -- with completely different biographies, of course. (One of the main characters, Laurence Oliphant, was a real person, but I didn't find that out until after I had finished it.)

If you like to dwell in the land of What If, you'll enjoy this novel. The basic premise is that Charles Babbage's analytical engine actually worked as theorized, kicking off an Information Age in Britain along with the Industrial Age, and generating a violent revolution that all but destroyed the aristocracy and substituted a meritocracy in which scientists, generally known as "savants," became the powerful elite in the ruling Radical Party. The real Lord Byron embraced revolutionary politics and died from a fever in 1824, contracted during the Greek Revolution. In our alternate history, he turned against his own class in Britain's revolutionary fervor and became prime minister in the 1850s, presumably losing interest in literary endeavors; his daughter Ada has become famous as the Queen of Engines, sharing in Babbage's success (her real addiction to gambling is retained here and is a major plot point). Just as the real British Empire reached its peak in the Victorian Era, this fictional Britain wields even more power, unchallenged by an America that has splintered into autonomous factions made up of The Republic of California, The Republic of Texas, the Confederate States and the Union. Britain plays the sides off one another, even secretly arming the Native Americans to keep the former colony weak.

Technological innovations abound. There are steampunk variations of automobiles -- coal-powered steam "gurneys" ply the London streets along with horse-drawn equipages; there are mentions of airships and submersibles, speaking tubes, and mechanical wonders called kinotropes that can be manipulated to present video-like imagery. But the primary technological focus is the increasingly sophisticated power of the "engines" that fill government buildings and businesses, housing data on every Briton (everyone has a Citizenship number linked to their file), creating a nascent surveillance society reminiscent of the NSA.

A leading young savant named Edward Mallory, who has discovered the first brontosaurus in a British-led expedition to Wyoming, has come home something of a hero. A risky wager on the outcome of a steam gurney race at Epsom has also made him well-to-do, but he becomes mixed up in a deadly scheme aimed at acquiring a mysterious box of punch cards, first seen in the possession of a radical adherent of the exiled Texas President Sam Houston, then in the hands of Ada Byron herself, who Mallory rescues from the clutches of kidnappers. She disappears after making him promise to hide the box until she can retrieve it safely. Unfortunately for Mallory, he has made enemies that will stop at nothing to get at whatever powerful program exists on this set of cards. That is about as much of the plot as I can attest to. I'm still not entirely sure what was on those damned cards, but that hardly matters. Dropping into this strangely warped version of Victorian London is its own kind of fun. John Keats is a well-known "clacker" -- specifically as a manipulator of kinotrope machines -- and Byron is a politician who ruthlessly "disappeared" his political enemies at the height of revolution, even exiling his opponent, the unfortunate Percy Bysshe Shelley, to the island of St. Helena. Polluted London has succumbed to the Great Stink, horrifyingly described in all its odorous and disgusting details.

The Difference Engine isn't perfect, but if you enjoy any of the above aspects of  the story (which I've been rather long-winded in trying to describe), it's definitely worth a vacation read. You might have to look up some weird Victoriana along the way if you're not an aficionado of the period. More tech-minded people will probably be amused by completely different things than I've highlighted here. One last fun fact for me was finding out that William Gibson grew up in southwest Virginia, not far from my own hometown. How did this fact escape me? I thought I knew all the famous writer connections to my old stomping grounds. Pretty cool.

Crooked paths: The Snow Leopard

Mt. Kailash (Crystal Mountain)

After reading the NYT feature on Peter Matthiessen, just days before his death, I decided to read The Snow Leopard, which won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1979. It is his recounting of  a trek through Nepal with his friend, the biologist, George Schaller.,

The goal for Schaller was to study the blue sheep of the Himalayas in their remote natural habitat on the Tibetan plateau, in the region known as Dolpo. It is also home to one of the most sacred places for Buddhists, Hindus, Jainists, and the Bön religion (predating Buddhism), the Crystal Mountain. As a Zen practitioner, Matthiessen was not only assisting his friend, but also making a pilgrimage and working through the aftermath of his wife's recent death from cancer.

The appeal of the book is multifaceted. First, there is the description of this adventurous trek through some of the most challenging geography on earth. Narrow, twisting paths through high mountain passes, snow fields, and icy ravines offered constant danger and discomfort. With scant fuel and food sources, everything had to be carried with the help of porters and sherpa guides. Retaining the help of these necessary men provided much of the external drama, as well as the threat that inclement winter weather would trap the entire party within the Dolpo for longer than they had food, fuel, or money. Matthiessen's descriptions of his fellow travelers and the natural beauty of the landscape are finely detailed. It is the land of the elusive snow leopard, which they hope to see, and of the yeti, a creature that the writer suggests may not be purely mythical: Such a remote, ghostly, and barren waste could hide an as-of-yet undiscovered being, even more mysterious and as rarely seen as the snow leopard.

And finally, there is the inner journey, which Matthiessen weaves into the story seamlessly. Memories of his wife, especially in her final days, accompany him. He becomes a clear-eyed observer of the river of thoughts and feelings that confront him as the trek becomes ever more dangerous. He sees himself reacting harshly and unjustly to those around him, then acting on generous impulses. He is sometimes despairing and sometimes consumed with joy and serenity. Beautifully written throughout, The Snow Leopard is a book that stays with you and opens a window on to worlds rarely glimpsed -- both the external reality of Dolpo and the internal life of the mind.

I found some great video on youtube of current-day trekkers making the same journey (though in less forbidding weather). I wanted to see some of what Matthiessen so vividly described, like the narrow path rising above Lake Phuksumdo in Nepal:

Monte Cristo: More than a sandwich!

by Yann Droneaud via Flickr

Okay, I probably am more familiar with the novel than the sandwich, but I had not actually read it until a few weeks ago. In fact, it is the first Alexandre Dumas I've ever read. Not even The Three Musketeers! I'm not sure how I've gone for so long ignoring Dumas, since I've read so many other French writers from Hugo to Robbe-Grillet (and even Michel Houellebecq, whom I'm not sure I should mention in polite company). Of course, I have one other major omission in my reading of French literature. Proust! But there's still time; I'm just working up to it.

There are some classics you can probably get away with pretending that you've read, simply because they are so ubiquitous in literary conversations and essays, not to mention, the movie versions. But somehow, I must have tuned all that out, because I really knew nothing of the plot except that it was a revenge story. Briefly, our hero Edmond Dantes, a young sailor on the cusp of professional success and marriage to the girl he loves, is falsely betrayed to the royalist government as a Bonapartist spy in 1815, just before Napoleon escapes Elba in an attempt to regain power. Edmond is sent to the island prison called Chateau d'If (pictured above) -- the French version of Devil's Island -- and left to die through the machinations of an envious shipmate, a jealous lover, and a guilty judge, who sacrifices Edmond to conceal a dark secret of his own.

I'm not to going to give away much more of the plot, so like me, you can read it with surprise. Suffice to say, Edmond manages to escape his prison and create an entirely new identity (several actually). These feats rather miraculously achieved, he sets about tracking down and exacting revenge on those who were responsible for all that he lost.

The Count of Monte Cristo is a good, old-fashioned adventure story and has a number of well-drawn characters, particularly the villains: Caderousse, Danglars, Morcerf, and Villefort. It is also epic in length (first published in 18 parts as a serialized novel, much like Dickens' works), but if you're ready to settle into a fictional world and stay awhile, you won't mind. I liked the rich historical background, Dumas' description of Carnival season in Rome, and of course, all the details of Parisian life in the 19th Century.

Dantes contemplates suicide:

Before him is a dead sea that stretches in azure calm before the eye; but he who unwarily ventures within its embrace finds himself struggling with a monster that would drag him down to perdition. Once thus ensnared, unless the protecting hand of God snatch him thence, all is over, and his struggles but tend to hasten his destruction. This state of mental anguish is, however, less terrible than the sufferings that precede or the punishment that possibly will follow. There is a sort of consolation at the contemplation of the yawning abyss, at the bottom of which lie darkness and obscurity. (Project Gutenberg edition, p.110)

Hild by Nicola Griffith

Based on the life of St. Hilda, founding abbess of the Monastery at Whitby, Hild is the story of a young girl in 7th-century, post-Roman Britain, when the isle was divided into warring kingdoms. Most of what little is known about Hilda, comes from the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English, written in 731. This spare history leaves yawning gaps in Hild's life, which is where novelist Nicola Griffith comes in and boldly imagines her life -- a princess in Anglo-Saxon England, a counselor to kings, an early Christian convert, and finally, an abbess who became a saint in the Catholic Church. Here is some of what we know about the historical woman, born in 614: her father Hereric, a would-be king, was poisoned while in exile; she, her sister Hereswith, and mother Breguswith went to join the court of King Edwin of Northumbria (her uncle) when she was still a child, and in 627, the king and all his court, including Hild, were baptized on Easter day in 627. These are the bare facts on which Griffith builds the rest of her story.

I didn't plan it this way, but I can't think of a better book to champion during Women's History Month. Griffith's work is historical fiction at its finest, illuminating a slice of Anglo-Saxon history that begins and ends for most of us with Beowulf and the heroic culture of the mead hall. Kings, thegns, and mythical beasts aside, women usually occupy the shadows, but in Hild, the towering figure at the center of the tale is a girl on her journey to adulthood as king's seer, fearsome warrior-princess, and political intriguer in a complex web of dynastic and religious power shifts. Griffith has been compared to Hilary Mantel, and for good reason. Her meticulous research, intricate plotting, and beautiful characterizations are definitely on the level of Mantel's best work in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. As imagined by Griffith, a 13-year-old Hild could go toe-to-toe with Thomas Cromwell any day.

In the novel, Hild grows into a role prophesied by her canny mother Breguswith, to be "the light of the world," a seer, a reader of omens, and counselor to King Edwin of Northumbria. In this world, counsel generally pertains to helping the king consolidate his power and puzzling out who is planning to invade, assassinate, make war, or conspire against him. Breguswith has created a path for her daughter, but it is one with incredibly high stakes. A seer who gives the king bad advice is liable, as Edwin threatens Hild at one point, to have her body thrown in the river with "tongue and toes tied in a bag around her neck."

Even as a child, Hild's position is precarious, shadowed by death, bound by secrets, and dependent on a suspicious and short-tempered patron. Because she is king's seer, the young Hild sometimes accompanies the war parties, which puts her in the unusual position of having to learn to defend herself. She is barred from carrying a sword like a warrior, but she learns how to handle the deadly seax, a dagger-like blade worn in her belt. Later, she learns to fight with a staff as well. She's no Disney princess. Violence is frequent and merciless.

The purely fictional characters that Griffith creates to people Hild's life are Cian, a childhood playmate and son of her mother's gemaecce (a formal friendship between women, sort of a lady-in-waiting, but more intimately paired); Hild's own gemaecce, Begu, and her "bodywoman" (slave), Gwladus. One of the best scenes in the novel, and most pivotal, is how Hild comes to acquire Gwaldus. Another important figure is the captured Irish priest Fursey, who teaches Hild to read Latin and introduces her to Christianity.

Hild is an empowering heroine of great physical strength and intelligence, but the secondary pleasures of this novel are manifold, such as the progress of Cian from romping boy with a wooden sword to fierce warrior in Edwin's army and the richly detailed descriptions of the Anglo-Saxon warrior culture. Griffith learned everything she could about jewels, armor, weaving, pagan religion, herbal medicine, and the life of the mead hall to render a world that seems as real to us as our own. It may not be what actually happened, but it is what should have happened --such is the assurance of the writer.

The excerpt below is from the aftermath of one of the more brutal chapters in which Hild has led a band of warriors to clear out marauding bandits on land she has sworn to protect. There is a myth building up around her now, not just as a royal representative of "the king's fist," but a witch, an unkillable being, one who must be feared and followed.

They hammered stakes across the gap and impaled the bodies, the heads, the hands, in a long row facing Craven, all branded with the wolf's head. That night , by firelight , her men limewashed their unused shields and painted a staked man and a wariangle in a glistening mix of blood, rust, and oil. Men of the butcher-bird....
She told herself it was all to the good. The rumours were doing her work for her. But not far from the road a tremulous voice shrieked Butcher-bird! and a hazel tree shook as someone small scrambled out of reach.
She wanted to leap offer her horse, climb up the tree, back the child against the trunk, and shout, It's how I keep us safe!
But there was no us. Belonging was not a seer's wyrd. (p. 422)

Occupy London: Thomas More's Utopia

Reading Thomas More's Utopia, it is cold comfort that as screwed up as we think things are now...well, they were screwed up in almost exactly the same ways 500 years ago.

I must freely own that as long as there is any property, and while money is the standard of all other things, I cannot think that a nation can be governed either justly or happily: not justly, because the best things will fall to the share of the worst men; nor happily, because all things will be divided among a few (and even these are not in all respects happy), the rest being left to be absolutely miserable.

That's a sentiment that could come from Occupy camps in any city. And as to the folly of politicians, More's narrator explains how the citizens of Utopia do not allow any debate to be had on the same day a bill is proposed in order to head off "rash" talk.

...And in the heat of discourse engage themselves too soon, which might bias them so much that, instead of consulting the good of the public, they might rather study to support their first opinions, and by a perverse and preposterous sort of shame hazard their country rather than endanger their own reputation, or venture the being suspected to have wanted foresight in the expedients that they at first proposed.

I will have More know that the delay of only one day does not hinder any politician from "perverse and preposterous" stands on the issues. More wrote  Utopia in Latin around 1516 but it was not translated into English and published in his home country until 1551, well after Henry VIII had him beheaded in 1535 for refusing to recognize the King as Head of the Church (Act of Supremacy).

More was an intriguing character in Hilary Mantel's novel, Wolf Hall, but treated much less sympathetically than in the movie, A Man for All Seasons. I will have to look into a good, balanced biography of More.

All hung over with Kingsley Amis

Lucky Jim has been recommended to me several times, usually by people who couldn't believe I hadn't already read it. It is well-known as a scorching comic novel of academic life at a provincial university in post-war England. I read the New York Review Books edition in their classics series, which all serious readers should check out. They offer some really interesting, and slightly off-the-beaten track titles, many of which had gone out of print. They also include good introductions by contemporary writers and cool cover art.

I have to admit, it took me awhile to get in the spirit of the novel and start appreciating the humor. It is unremittingly mean-spirited. Once I got over trying to like Jim or anyone else, it was better. Jim is a composite, according to Keith Gessen's introduction, of Amis and his pal Philip Larkin, the poet. (I'm pretty sure I would not want to share a pint with either). Jim is a junior lecturer in Medieval History, a subject he finds short of inspirational:

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up...by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African government, Chiang Kai-shek, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages. Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as miserable, as cocksure, as bad at art, as dismally ludicrous, or as wrong as they'd been in the Middle Age...? (p. 87) 

That quote alone makes the novel worth reading, and there are numerous smaller gems such as one character's face looking "more than ever like Genghis Khan meditating a purge of his captains." And, of course, one of the most deservedly famous descriptions of a hangover in literature:

He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth has been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by a secret police. He felt bad. (p. 60)

Happy endings?

One of the greatest challenges of writing a novel (and one reason I've had so many false starts) is figuring out how to finish it. There's nothing more deflating for a reader than a novel that falls flat at the end. And, of course, a good finale doesn't mean it has to be a "happy ending." It can be uplifting, heartbreaking, tragic, or surprising, but the end has to feel satisfyingly complete and fit the tone of the story. I've been thinking about this lately after reading a novel by Geraldine Brooks called Caleb's Crossing. This is the only novel I've read by Brooks (she won the Pulitzer for People of the Book), and she is a fine writer.

The story is narrated by young Bethea Mayfield (completely fictional), the daughter of one of the original English colonizers of Martha's Vineyard in the 1600s, and it is very loosely based on a real Wampanoag man who was the first native to graduate from Harvard College. Bethea and Caleb meet clandestinely as children and become friends, but events conspire to bring Caleb into the Christian mission as a student of Bethea's father. The remarkable young scholar is trained to join the first class of natives at Harvard, a project of benefactors still living in England for the most part. That is the backbone of the story, which beautifully details the yearnings of a gifted young woman who craves learning for herself and the complications of a friendship between two people divided by their cultures.

This novel is right in my wheelhouse -- well-written historical fiction set in early colonial America. It is one of those novels that I was completely enamored by until the very end, when the painstakingly detailed journey of the characters flashes suddenly forward to their various ends. It was just a weird pacing for me, especially after having come to sympathize so  much with the main characters. Their stories were dispatched, I thought, with a rather cold brevity. Perhaps I'm nitpicking here, because there is so much to like. For me, a so-so book with a flat ending is all of a piece and soon forgotten; however, the better the novel is in the beginning and middle parts, the more disappointing it is when the ending goes splat.

This happens all the time (perhaps more frequently) in other mediums. Television is rife with them: Lost. Need I say more? Ditto, Twin Peaks. I can't count Deadwood, because they didn't get a chance to wrap it up before cancellation (for shame, HBO!). On the other hand, I thought Breaking Bad's finale was brilliant and so was MASH's. Getting the ending right is what distinguishes a classic from mere entertainment.

Have you had this experience with books -- when you liked everything about it except the end? I felt the same disappointment in Donna Tartt's otherwise terrifically creepy The Little Friend. I literally couldn't put it down; I read it until my head hurt. Perhaps nothing could sustain my level of intrigue at the finish. I'm not even sure what it was about it that made me feel let down. On the contrary, endings that I loved were Ann Patchett's Bel Canto and Meyer's The Son. What about you? I'd like to know which books jump out at you for having either very satisfying or bad ends.

My year in books: 2013

As an English lit major, a bookseller, a writer, and an editor, I've spent my entire life among books. I occasionally see the dismal statistics on how little the general populace reads, a figure that continues to plummet. It baffles my understanding -- right up there with string theory, reality TV, and wine spritzers. I'm thankful to have been born into a vanishing community of readers, even before my education and professional life propelled me into it.

Maybe my family's reading mania was due to growing up in a rural area where opportunities for cheap entertainment weren't that numerous. Our tastes were catholic -- mouse-nibbled copies of Shakespeare lay cheek by jowl with Harlequin romances and Hardy Boys mysteries. We had those old books of fairy tales -- the most dark and twisted kind with terrifying illustrations. My early grounding in stories of witches tossing little kids into the fire and ogres grinding up the bones of other unfortunates prepared me for the grown-up horrors of George Orwell and Cormac McCarthy.

The foregoing is a long-winded explanation of what feels like an extremely old-fashioned thing to do: a retrospective of books read in the previous year. It's not exhaustive, but I'll mention some of the notable ones, which I would recommend to others.

While immersed in 19th century literature, I read the biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne by James Mellow and re-read Moby Dick. A novel that neatly fell into the midst of these interests was Joyce Carol Oates' The Accursed. A sprawling, Hawthorne-haunted tale of ghosts and demons in turn of the century New Jersey, Oates packed in maybe one too many plot threads, but overall the story was a fascinating mix of purely fictional and historic characters crossing paths during Woodrow Wilson's tenure as president of Princeton. The spine of the novel concerns an old New England family, the Slades, and the curse that afflicts them. Spooky weddings, murders, vampires, and all manner of supernatural disasters lie in wait for the unhappy Slades. If you can manage the layered plots (some more successful than others), you'll encounter not only Wilson, but Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, Jack London, and Grover Cleveland.

My "summer vacation" book had to wait until an October beach trip, but I picked a perfect one. Pure by Andrew Miller offers a slice of pre-revolutionary French history. A young engineer is handed the dubious challenge of "purifying" and dismantling the Cemetery of Les Innocents, a centuries-old burial ground in Paris (later the site of Les Halles market). The cemetery's walls are disintegrating, the charnel pits literally overflowing into the surrounding city, and in the interest of public health, Jean-Baptiste Baratte must direct the digging up of the bodies and their removal in the face of a disapproving public and a half-mad priest who still inhabits the derelict church that stands on the grounds. If your benchmark for good historical fiction is Hilary Mantel, then you won't be disappointed with Miller's richly detailed world and its cast of colorful characters, including, again, both the historical and the imagined.

Keeping with my theme of classic American literature, I read Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood and then got caught up in the collection of her letters edited by Sally Fitzgerald, Habit of Being. The letters are a revelation, if you are an O'Connor fan. The sharp-edged humor is expected, but the thoughtful explanation of her Catholic faith and stoic attitude to her declining health are truly engaging. It is also a wonderful testament to the craft of writing, which she never tried to disguise as anything other than a discipline that required sustained work and attention, and the confidence to insist on her own unique vision. She greatly valued the input of trusted editors, but stood firm when it came down to preserving the integrity of her original ideas. Her letters are instructive and inspirational for any would-be writer.

I ended the year very neatly where  I started out -- back in New England with one  of America's most influential and original poets, Emily Dickinson. Her biographer, Alfred Habegger, borrows the subtitle from a line of one of her poems, "My wars are laid away in books." I feel much better prepared to return to the poetry itself after getting a better idea of the formative relationships and significant events of her life. Habegger relies on more recent scholarship, original sources, and a clear-eyed interpretation of the many gaps and vague clues that remain from her life. While he punctures the myth of the white-clad hermit of Amherst, there still remains the essential, alluring mystery of Emily Dickinson's power as a writer -- a  great feat of scholarship and writing.

And in the dwindling days of the year, I returned to one of my favorite settings in American lit, the Old West. Going old school, I read Elmore Leonard's Hombre, the basis for the movie with Paul Newman. It's a classic Western, featuring Leonard's signature stripped-down prose and heroes who don't quite fit the standard heroic mode. Oh, just read it; it only takes a few hours!

My very last entry for the year took a bit longer, but is a great American novel. Thomas Berger's Little Big Man deserves a wider readership than it is probably getting these days. I suspect that it has been pegged as merely "Western" genre fiction, but it is far more than that. Narrated by it's 111-year-old narrator, it is the picaresque adventures of Jack Crabbe, kidnapped by the Cheyenne at age 10, he claims to be the only white survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn, and in between, meets iconic Western figures -- Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, and Custer himself. It is immediately engaging, humorous, moving and will make you think deeply about America's history with Native Americans. Published in 1964, it is the basis for the movie with Dustin Hoffman. It was especially interesting to me, having read this year's acclaimed novel, The Son, by Philipp Meyer. The protagonist's experience as a young boy, kidnapped by the Comanche in 1846, closely resembles that of old Jack Crabbe, but the two novels are as different as night and day in general tone and narrative style.

These are the books that most affected me in 2013, and I haven't quite decided how to begin 2014. I'm eager to get to Donna Tartt's Goldfinch, but there are always tremendous back logs of books that I've neglected.

What books do you have in mind for the new year? Tackling the classics or catching up with what's new?

Manifest Destiny, Philipp Meyer, and the way the West was won

New Mexico butte (Public Domain)

I've always loved a good Western. My brothers and I would stay up late on Saturday nights to watch John Wayne movies and after school, it was often Bonanza, Gun Smoke, and even The Big Valley, where the hair was teased and all the women were impossibly fashionable. From My Darling Clementine to Unforgiven and Deadwood, I'm still stuck on the genre. As a kid, who doesn't romanticize the cowboys and Indians, the non-stop action of shootouts, and galloping horses across vast plains? All that messy American history hasn't yet dimmed the glory of the Wild West.

Of course, a more sophisticated understanding of the history of settling the west brings with it all sorts of moral conundrums, and the best of the Western genre, whether in film or books, gets the deep ambivalence at the heart of it. The lines between "bad" guys and "good" guys blur; one minute you're cheering for the intrepid pioneers circling their wagons and the next, you're admiring the courage of the Sioux or Apache warriors attacking the wagons. It's the heyday of the anti-hero: Billy the Kid and Jesse James sticking it to the Man. Occupy Dodge City!

Dodge City Peace Commissioners: Wyatt Earp, front center (Public Domain)

At some point ambivalence turns to downright disillusion. Wounded Knee, Powder River, and Border Wars pile up the bodies on the ever-expanding frontier in the history books. Rivers of blood and displacement accompany the march westward, and yet the fascination lingers. The very lostness of the myth compels the imagination, a sad enchantment takes over. You start with Wyatt Earp and are left with the hideous Judge Holden in McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

All that was taken belonged to someone else first. And that is what brings me to Philipp Meyer's newest novel, The Son. It is an oft-repeated phrase in the lives of three generations of the McCullough family of Texas, whose history spans a period from the 1800s through 2012. The first McCullough we hear from is the formidable Eli, known as The Colonel, his story set as a WPA recording in 1936. Occupying a homestead beyond the settlement line in 1846 near Pedernales, thirteen-year-old Eli recounts the brutal murders of his family by raiding Comanches while his father is absent. He is kidnapped and taken west by the Comanche band, giving us the most thrilling parts of the novel. After his slow assimilation into the tribe and eventual return to his white roots, Eli builds the McCullough holdings, section by section, and passes it to his ancestors.

The story then alternates between Eli's remembrances, his son Peter's journals, and a great-granddaughter, Jeannie, who brings us into the present day. Along the way, history unfolds from the final surrender of the great Comanche Chief Quanah Parker, through the Border Wars with Mexico and two world wars, to the age of the oil barons.

Meyer's novel is masterful, an old-style epic of an American family that confronts the moral quagmire of what Manifest Destiny really entails -- wiping out all that is "other" in the quest to remake a continent into an American ideal. It's a story of decline and fall in the Edward Gibbon line: of a family, of the Native Americans, of Mexican territorial ambitions, and of the land itself, stripped and denuded, first for cattle and then for oil.

What keeps the novel from becoming a strident and oversimplified critique of evil American empire-building is that the characters themselves mourn the losses that will bring them ever greater wealth and power, a quintessentially American dilemma. Eli grieves more for his Comanche family than his white one, misses the empty plains and thigh-high grasses of his boyhood. For Peter, the debilitating guilt that springs from his family's raid on their Mexican neighbors blights his life; even the hard-nosed Jeannie mourns the disappearance of the old ranching lifestyle that makes possible her oil fortune and hard-won entry into the male-dominated world of business. Everything is bought at a price and sometimes the price makes all the rest, if not quite worthless, terribly fractured.

On the craftsman's level, Meyer's meticulous detailing of the Comanche lifestyle through the voice of Eli often reminded me of Melville's descriptions of the whaling life in Moby Dick. Eli takes the reader through the process of killing the buffalo -- in what manner the animal was dispatched, who performed the various tasks of disassembly, who was allowed the chief delicacies, and the further uses of each and every part in stomach-churning specificity. Similarly, the making of lariats, bows and arrows, and tipis is lovingly rendered -- all the more lovely because even in Eli's days, these things become meaningless anachronisms.

Meyer's writing is very finely nuanced; he balances the weight of history with the storytelling, and most impressive of all, he pulls off an ending that is both practically satisfying and wonderfully symbolic -- two things that don't often go hand-in-hand.

From The Son, by Philipp Meyer, Chapter Nineteen:

All in all, it was the greatest summer I had ever had.... I might be killed any day, by whites or hostile Indians, I might be run down by a grizzly or a pack of buffalo wolves, but I rarely did anything I didn't feel like doing, and maybe this was the main difference between the whites and the Comanches, which was the whites were willing to trade all their freedom to live longer and eat better, and the Comanches were not willing to trade any of it.

The Eustace Diamonds

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eustace_Diamonds

The Eustace Diamonds is the third in Anthony Trollope's series of six books known as the Palliser novels. They are stand-alone stories, but share a set of characters, some of whom emerge as the main players in their own dramas but may be only on the periphery of others. They interconnect to form a richly peopled and detailed Victorian world that chiefly deals with the political set -- both the aristocrats and ambitious climbers who are trying either to make their way or keep their place in a highly stratified world that is just beginning to adjust to the winds of change.

Trollope's cozy, familiar, gossipy voice addresses the reader directly as he alternately sympathizes with or skewers the foibles of his heroes and heroines. In The Eustace Diamonds, he makes a case for his heroine being the very good and rather prosaic Lucy Morris, a poor young governess who is in love with an ambitious young man, a barrister and member of Parliament, Frank Greystock. But as one may guess from the title, the real "heroine" is Lizzie Eustace, a very beautiful and clever young woman, widowed fortuitously by Sir Florian Eustace, who makes her a very generous will.

Lizzie is grasping, duplicitous, mean-spirited, and narcissistic, but she gets a lot further than others would because she is also rich, young, and beautiful. The diamonds of the title are the crown jewels of the Eustace family, and when Sir Florian dies, rather than give them back up to the family to be kept in trust for her own son, Lizzie refuses, claiming that her husband gave them to her as a personal gift, which is only one of the many lies she tells. This gets the solicitors to planning lawsuits, which makes Lizzie even more obstinate and leads to a great many ridiculous measures to keep them out of anyone's hands but her own.

The plot turns on the battle between Lizzie and nearly everyone else -- her alienated family, the lawyers, and even her betrothed, the weak-willed Lord Fawn. She is a deliciously terrible creation, what these days we would simply call a sociopath. Lying is as natural to her as breathing. She feels very ill-used while amorally pursuing her own desires. I've often wondered how some people can go so blithely through life exactly as Lizzie does with no sense of conscience. Trollope offers a window into these types -- creatures so entirely consumed with themselves that they have no thoughts left over to empathize with others. He sympathizes, tongue in cheek, with his heroine:

Poor Lizzie! The world, in judging people who are false and bad and selfish and prosperous to outward appearances, is apt to be hard upon them, and to forget the punishments which generally accompany such faults. Lizzie Eustace was very false and bad and selfish -- and, we may say, very prosperous also; but in the midst of all she was thoroughly uncomfortable. She was never at ease. There was no green spot in her life with which she could be contented. ["Ianthe's Soul," The Eustace Diamonds]

As always, Trollope's cavalcade of characters are well-developed and his prose is always light and witty. The one point of discomfort is the rather startling anti-semitic descriptions of all the Jewish characters, who are all dispatched in the broadest negative and corrosive stereotypes. I haven't read anything about his views, but judging from this example, he was no progressive, contrasting starkly with fellow Victorian, George Eliot, who was far more fair and sympathetic.

From hell's heart I stab at thee: Re-reading Moby Dick

I spent much of March and April returning to Moby Dick by Herman Melville. There are certain books that are likely to speak to the reader differently, depending on where your head is at the time. I first read Moby Dick during a quiet summer without much thought, liking it enough to stick with it, but gliding rather inattentively over long sections of description. The second time, I appreciated the humor of it and the meticulous build-up to the ultimate scene of the Pequod's destruction.

Where before I was but little interested in the natural history of the sperm whale or the detailed rendering of every aspect of the whaling industry and the men who partook in it, this time I found it to be fascinating reading. I am much more curious about the natural world than I used to be, so even after putting aside the story, I found myself looking up pictures of the sperm whale, its skeletal framework, and the random Wikipedia articles about ambergris. I also had the added spur of planning a trip to Boston at the same time, where I knew I would at least be in the same general region of New Bedford and the early scenes of the novel (the picture here is taken from Marblehead, near Salem, which is well north of New Bedford, where the Whaling Museum is located).

Reading the novel for the second time, I didn't need to rely on its reputation as an American classic, I felt it on my own -- original, vivid, and deeply convincing in its very American-ness. The Pequod is a melting pot of New England characters -- black, white, and native -- foreigners and adventurers, young and old. They are deeply religious, pagan, opportunistic, competent, brave, witty, foolhardy, naive, mad, obsessed...a microcosm of the contradictory and mystifying American "character."

Melville wrote a masterpiece -- a novel that he described in a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, as a very "wicked book."  There are many things he could have meant by that word, "wicked." He subverts stereotypes about race and otherness, takes on religion and the idea of God, pokes fun, and weaves in an extraordinary amount of sexually-charged language and sly innuendo. No doubt, he awaited Hawthorne's response to it with a fair amount of trepidation. In his rambling, elated letter, Melville is grateful to his friend: "But, now and then as you read, you understood the pervading thought that impelled the book -- and that you praised. Was it not so? You were archangel enough to despise the imperfect body, and embrace the soul." Unfortunately, the letter from Hawthorne to Melville is lost to us.

For pure majesty of language, Melville is hard to match. I'll end with the excerpt from Chapter 42, "The Whiteness of the Whale":

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows- a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues- every stately or lovely emblazoning- the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge- pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt? 

Melville redux

I've been a little immersed in 19th century literature lately. I just read a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne -- one of those writers whose presence haunts all of American literature. The Scarlet Letter always draws me in. If I pick it up again and begin reading -- somewhere at random, or from the beginning, I fall back into its spell -- the secret sin of the pastor, the female outsider who endures, and the wronged husband -- all the buried emotion and twisted obsessions that motivate the characters -- Hester, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth. It is Hawthorne at his most assured, in beautiful, crystalline prose that for all its coolness, also burns and thrills, or so it seems to me.

And of course, that other novel that dominates American literature is Moby Dick, by Hawthorne's contemporary and passionate admirer, Herman Melville. I read Moby Dick years ago, one quiet summer while working in a university English department as an office admin and going to graduate school at night. It was the same summer that I put together one of those huge DIY office desks. Just me, Melville, and a power screw driver. It was one of the times in my life, when I was most solitary -- single, living in a town where I had no family and no close friends. Call me Ishmael. I, too, could choose a name, start a new story.

Melville has always been an interesting figure to me, both because of his writing (I always loved the perfectly weird short story, Bartleby the Scrivener) and snippets of his personal life that I've encountered here and there. His later life was rather sad, after his early success and fame. His finances collapsed and his home life disintegrated. He appears as a forlorn and broken man in Frederick Busch's darkly beautiful novel, The Night Inspector, when he has taken a job as a customs inspector for the city of New York and his oldest son, has shot and killed himself -- unclear whether by accident or suicide. Melville is buried in a cemetery in the Bronx.

Lately, I've been contemplating the value of re-reading old books as opposed to consuming new ones. Philip Roth, who announced his retirement from fiction recently, said that he was re-reading writers that he hadn't returned to for 50 years -- Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Faulkner, and Hemingway. It made sense to me, and after encountering Melville in the Hawthone biography, it made me think about that summer and how I was surprised and enamored by a book, that frankly, I thought might be a bit of a drag. So I've decided to re-read Moby Dick. I expect it will be quite a different experience nearly 20 years later, and living quite a different life. Maybe I'll identify more with Ahab this time. Who knows?

What books have you re-read? Mine is a short list: The Scarlett Letter, Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and Little Men. There may be a few more of far less stature, and maybe something else I've forgotten.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

If hard pressed to name a favorite novel, on most days my choice comes down between George Eliot's Middlemarch and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. It neatly balances English and American, female and male, feeling and detachment. I've read most, if not all, the production of both -- certainly the major works -- including Eliot's letters and multiple biographies. But of Hawthorne, I haven't read that much about the man, until the biography I just finished, James Mellow's Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Times, which won the National Book Award in 1993. It is a great biography -- meticulously researched, even-handed, and elegantly written. It doesn't make great leaps in speculation or psychological diagnosis -- it just presents a portrait that emerges from Hawthorne's own writings, notebooks, and letters and contemporary accounts.

One reason I love to read biographies of literary people is that the best ones take in so much more of the general history and culture of their lives. Hawthorne didn't go in for most of the transcendental philosophy of his friends, neighbors, and colleagues -- Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, and Alcott. He visited the Shaker communities (with some withering commentary) and was a resident at Brook Farm, one of the Utopian experimental communities, but he remained skeptical and conservative -- the original stiff-necked New Englander. He regarded radical abolitionists rather severely and seemed largely unmoved by the plight of slaves in the South (of whom he had no personal knowledge and seemingly little curiosity, much to the chagrin of Emerson and his own sister-in-law, Elizabeth Peabody). He wasn't so much skeptical of mesmerism and spiritualism, as he was leery of them. There might be something there, but he thought it was too dangerous to pursue.

He was thoroughly unsentimental (excepting, perhaps,  regarding his devoted wife, Sophia, who all her life, likened him to a demi-god or angel, dropped straight out of heaven), did not like to be touched, and was just this side of anti-social. He was notoriously hard to get to know, even for such a passionate admirer as his friend, Herman Melville. He met few of the literary lions of his age even after he had achieved his own level of fame. When he served as consul in Liverpool for several years, Mellow points out that he claimed to try to arrange a meeting with Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot) but was not successful, although how hard he really tried is debatable. He silently observed Lord Tennyson ( a favorite poet of his wife's) at a picture gallery, missed a chance to meet Thackeray (an author he admired), and never showed an inclination to meet Dickens. He did attend a dinner with Anthony Trollope later in life when Trollope visited Boston, and according to Hawthorne's friend, James Field, who declared to him in a letter:

Trollope fell in love with you at first sight. He swears that you are the handsomest Yankee that ever walked the planet.

Hawthorne's obsessions with secret sin, historical guilt, and curses run through nearly all his fiction, but in even such a thorough biography, no particular reason for it is uncovered. Yes, his ancestor was a judge at the Salem witch trials, but his more immediate familial history and experience is rather unextraordinary. Why he held on to such remote, dark elements of his pre-history remains a mystery, unless, by comparison, his rather staid, small-town upbringing was so unimaginative that he had to cast back into the family's more colorful stories for inspiration.

The other small pleasures of biography are the random cross-hatchings that occur within the cozy world of 19th century literature. While serving as consul, one of the people Hawthorne met in passing was Ada Byron's husband, the Earl of Lovelace, looking for information on his wayward son who had gone missing (apparently the eldest, who joined the Navy and then deserted). Hawthorne made a pilgrimage of his own to visit Lord Byron's ancestral home, Newstead Abbey, shortly after Ada's death, thus creating a bridge to the last biography that I read last fall -- Ada Byron's (Bride of Science by Benjamin Wooley).

And then there's the weird trivia. For example, did you know that Hawthorne's only son Julian spent a year in an Atlanta penitentiary for his role in a shady stock scheme? Once sprung, he went to California, where he worked for the Pasadena newspaper as a journalist. He died in San Francisco in 1936. 1936! Hawthorne's youngest daughter, Rose joined the Order of St. Dominic and became Mother Alphonso, caring for terminally ill cancer patients until her death in 1926. I think I'm always surprised by how little time is encompassed in American history. That Hawthorne, who seems to belong to such an early era (compounded by his most famous novel being set in Puritan New England) could have a son who died just on the cusp of World War II is disorienting. I always have the eerie feeling of time being folded somehow.

But, whatever facts are yielded by the industrious biographers, nothing changes the indelible beauty and power of Hawthorne's masterpiece, and how wonderfully he enters into the experience of Hester Prynne -- a woman, an outsider, a fellow sinner, and an unlikely heroine, who shocked many of his contemporary readers in 1850:

But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed from society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers--stern and wild ones--and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss. (The Scarlet Letter, Chapter 18, "A Flood of Sunshine")

Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Hindenburg and Empire State Building, 1936. (silodrome.com)

Michael Chabon has become one of my favorite writers, based largely on The Yiddish Policeman's Union, The Mysteries of Pitsburgh, and numerous essays. I've had The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay on my list for years, and it's considered to be his masterpiece (thus far). This is the first book I purchased just for my Kindle -- to mark the occasion, so to speak.

The story is immediately engaging, plunging the reader into the world of Prague on the eve of World War II. The Kavalier family is determined to get their oldest son, Josef, out of Prague and to the safety of America as the Nazi presence becomes increasingly hostile to the Jewish community. Josef is a budding "escapist" in the tradition of Houdini, and this becomes his only route out of Czechoslovakia, concealed in a coffin, bound for Lithuania, which contains not only the refugee, but also the famed Golem, a revered object that the Jews of Prague want to save from Nazi depredations.

This fantastic exploit delivers the Golem to a new hiding place, and by a long route, Josef, to his relatives in Brooklyn, the Klaymans. His cousin Samuel, at work for a novelty company, finds that Josef is an accomplished artist, which feeds into his own ambition to get into the new phenomenon of comic books. Together, they create The Escapist and enter the highly competitive world of comics in the Golden Era of the genre -- the late 30s and 40s. I won't belabor the plot points and descriptions of other characters. It is, above all, a wonderful story -- fully developed characters inhabiting a world, rich in detail -- the landscape of New York in the 40s providing the backdrop for Chabon's fertile imagination. I chose the picture of the Empire State Building above because it figures so importantly in the mythology and action of the novel.

The book that I chose as my first ebook download from our local library was Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It was a quick read and entertaining. I would recommend it as a vacation-friendly book, nothing too taxing.

I can't imagine giving up my physical library -- there's too much pleasure to be had from the handling of books that you love, especially those from authors that are favorites. And there's also the weird, limbo-land of digital "ownership." Is it really yours? It's pretty hard to loan books to friends and family this way. And if I were not a particularly savvy person who didn't back up my library safely, how much trouble would it be to retrieve the books that I lost even after I legitimately purchased them, not to mention the issue of changing formats, if I decided I like the Nook or some other reader better? But, for books that you want to read but aren't that interested in adding to your library, or for out-of-copyright, freely-available books that you can download -- the Kindle certainly is a convenient and lightweight alternative. It's probably worth it's price just for traveling with an adequate library to hand. I'll just be looking for a nice edition of Chabon's Kavalier and Clay in its antique form to grace my physical bookshelves.

Still reading...now with Kindle!

No, I wasn't knocked out by the 900 pages of Parade's End last August; however, I have been very lazy about blogging since then, obviously. Right after PE, I couldn't get away from WWI and read a historical novel by Jeff Shaara. Rather more workmanlike than Ford (Shaara is not the stylist that his father Michael Shaara was, much less FMF), To the Last Man is still very good for its fictionalized take on the outsize characters of Baron Richthofen, Raoul Lufbery, John J. Pershing, Petain, and Clemenceau. It also folds in the evolution of aerial warfare with the Lafayette Escadrille (French air service but with many American volunteers) and the German air aces, of whom the most famous is the Red Baron. It sticks to real people even when it shifts from the high-ranking strategists to the boots on the ground. Trench warfare and the brutal fighting on the Western Front are brought to life through the experience of the young Marine, Roscoe Temple, who fought at Belleau Wood and St. Mihiel.

I followed up with the breezy and charming The Plague by Camus (just kidding). One has to emerge from world war by degrees, so a tense tale of exile, deprivation, and inevitable death bridged the gap to...Angels on Toast. The sharp American writer Dawn Powell was writing about Mad Men way back in the 40s. Traveling businessmen, their wives, mistresses, and general shenanigans are skillfully and wittily satirized by Powell. Needless to say, there's lots and lots of drinking and smoking, lies, and ruination. She's one of those really fine early 20th Century writers who has slipped under the radar for the most part (although canonized in the Library of America series).

Powell was a pretty good segue into another witty woman of the world, Nancy Mitford. One of the famous English Mitford sisters (right, Nancy is second from left), Nancy was brought up in the aristocratic atmosphere of a rambling country house with eccentric parents, and even more eccentric neighbors and relatives, all of whom people her stories. The Pursuit of Love in a Cold Climate is thinly veiled autobiography about the Radlett sisters, who go about finding and marrying and being variously tortured by all the wrong men. If Downton Abbey is the twilight of Empire, the Radletts exist quite a bit further into the gloaming. The Radletts are badly educated, irreverent, and outrageous in their quirks. The father of the clan is an irascible veteran of the Great War, claiming to have whacked several Germans to death with an entrenching tool, which is preserved with  bloodthirsty pride above the family fireplace. Mitford is effortlessly stylish, spinning out hilarious descriptions and dialogue that is shimmeringly droll. If you're suffering from winter blahs, Mitford will lighten your mood. I think I read this one during jury duty!

Okay, wrapping up very quickly here, I finished off jury duty with a good biography about Ada Byron (Benjamin Wooley's Bride of Science). Daughter of Lord Byron, she is considered to be the "mother of computer programming," due to her work with Charles Babbage, who created an early computer, the Difference Engine. Good stuff, for those of a geeky bent. Then, in the winter and toward the holidays, I got pretty lazy and/or distracted and read little -- The Call of the Wild by London and a very creepy occult novel of the late 1890's by Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan. If you're in the mood for rather baroque Satanic weirdness, you can download this gem from Project Gutenberg for free.

I'll break it off there for now, but as I hinted in the title, Santa hubby brought me my very first ebook reader for Christmas. I'm still in the early stages with it, but I have to admit, I kind of like the convenience: lightweight, well-lit, and I never lose my place or have to dig in the crevices of the sofa trying to locate my bookmark. How antique! Not to mention, downloading ebooks from the local library is pretty awesome. I'll tell you about the first book I bought and read on my Kindle next time. It had to be something to mark the occasion. Want to guess?